Affiliations: [a] Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Cheng-Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, Republic of China | [b] School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164 | [c] Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, Pacific Northwest Laboratory, Richland, WA 99352
Correspondence:
[*]
Correspondence to: C. S. Raghavendra
Note: [1] Contract grant sponsor: Boeing Centennial Chair Professor Funds; Contract grant sponsor: U.S. Department of Energy; Contract grant number: DE-AC06-76RLO 1830
Abstract: Ray tracing is one of the computer graphics techniques used to render high quality images. Unfortunately, ray tracing complex scenes can require large amounts of CPU time, making the technique impractical for everyday use. Parallel ray tracing algorithms could potentially be used to reduce the overall processing time. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three previously reported load balancing schemes for ray tracing on parallel processors, and propose two new load balancing strategies. We term the new methods Local Distributed Control (LDC) and Global Distributed Control (GDC). Our new strategies perform significantly better than the previous methods on three standard rendering benchmarks. The new methods are also complementary: GDC performs well for high computational complexity images, and LDC works well for low computational complexity images.
